Optic Flow

Imagine you’re driving along, when suddenly, an obstacle appears out of nowhere. What do you do? Did you notice it in time? And can you react quickly enough to avoid it safely?

The ability to navigate safely through the world depends largely on your ability to notice potential hazards in your peripheral vision while simultaneously paying attention to the road in front of you. Optic Flow—an exercise from BrainHQ’s Navigation category—requires you to make rapid visual discriminations in the center of your gaze while staying alert to potential hazards in the periphery.

In Optic Flow you’ll see a target shape on a sign. Vehicles and various roadside objects will then approach you at different speeds, and your task is to select the object with the target shape.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. You will start driving down a road. A large sign will appear overhead with a target object. Remember this object.
   
2. Continuing down the road, vehicles and roadside objects will appear at different speeds. Some of these vehicles and objects will have colorful shapes on them, similar to the target object. Other objects may have no shape present, and are there solely as distractors.
   
   
3. Select the portion of the screen that the target object appears in before you drive by it and it disappears (or if the target object is on the vehicle ahead of you, select it before you rear-end the vehicle ahead of you).
   

Tip!: If you are training from a computer, you can use the number keys on your keyboard to input an answer.

If an incorrect answer is given, you’ll hear a “bonk” sound and the level may slow down, giving you more time to locate the target object in following turns. If a correct answer is given, you’ll hear a “boop” sound and the level may speed up, making your brain locate the target object more quickly in following turns. In both cases, the level then continues, repeating from Step 1 above.

Optic Flow is what’s known as a Continuous Performance Task (CPT) exercise. This means that speed and accuracy are both important when you are selecting your answers. Because of this, there are two ways to be marked wrong:

• Selecting the incorrect answer
• Not answering correctly within the time limit

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Optic Flow from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

We also have a recording of a live demonstration of Optic Flow here:

As you progress through Optic Flow, it becomes more challenging in these ways:

• The shapes on the vehicles become more similar.
• The driving conditions change, making it more difficult to find the target shape and avoid hazards. As on the actual road, speed must be reduced to perform accurately as the conditions change (time of day, and weather).
• The number and type of hazards change.
• The backgrounds become more complex and distracting as you move from the desert to the suburbs, and finally to the bustling city.